What is Silverlight?

For years, web page animation has been restricted to animated gifs or the admittedly excellent vector graphic Flash. Now Microsoft is going to take Flash on with their Silverlight product, which provides graphical and animation display, with multimedia and interactivity built in. Version 1.1 which will be released in a few months will include a version of the .NET Framework so it can execute C# code. Like Java, Silverlight code runs in a sandbox without direct access to platform APIs for security.

Silverlight uses managed wrappers and should eventually be able to call JavaScript code directly. It's hard to imagine Silverlight replacing Flash but stranger things have happened. You can view the current state of development and many examples including videos on the Silverlight website.

See you soon!